Wednesday, April 1, 2009

F...Ful Heidegger

I don't know where to begin with this reading except to say: How many Beings could a being Be if a being could Be a being? Or, in other words, how many times can you legitimately say being in a sentence without confusing the hell out of me? I never thought there would be such a threshold or, at least, that I would ever discover the threshold of forms of 'be' in sentences that made it unclear to me what was going on. I'm going to estimate it at around 3, though. But I'm only stating that as an estimate. I hope by talking about this reading that I will find a way to up that threshold and really understand what's going on here.

I don't want to say that I didn't find anything interesting in the reading; only that much of it deserved more attention than the amount of time I have allotted to the 40 pages assigned. What I'm going to do here is highlight a couple of passages that I think I understand and give my interpretation of them. In so doing, you'll at least get an understanding of whether I am on the right track or not and can either laugh hysterically (it's okay... I've been doing the same) or applaud my reading comprehension skill.

"Thus '... with the [transcendence of There-being] comes-to-pass... the [comprehending] of the Being of beings. ...' Note, however, that transcendence is the 'coming-to-pass', the 'achieving' of ontological comprehending" (36).

This statement has two implications that I can see. One, it says that transcendence is the comprehension of or, I think, Heidegger might say the fleeting awareness of what Being is. Secondly, this awareness of Being is exhibited by other beings doing what they do best, that being Being. So, our awareness of Being is found in our sense of the other and a conjunction of those beings Being with our own being Being. I've just confused myself again. :)

Another interesting but seemingly simple idea is that, "Being... finds itself as an already existing fact, sc. immersed in its original situation as a comprehension of the Being of beings, and its '... origin and destiny are equally obscure...'"

This seems to be a very complicated way of saying that we are 'thrown' (Heidegger's word) into Being and are located in Being without any conception of where we came from or where we are supposed to go. That's really a profound statement if you think about it as we live our lives developing all of these thoughts that are centered around these two conceptions 'origin and destiny' trying to figure out what exactly those things are.

3 comments:

  1. This is more of a personal question, but why do you label your posts as "Faithful" so-and-so or "Unfaithful" so-and-so?

    ReplyDelete
  2. I love the title...it seems no one remembers

    ReplyDelete
  3. At the beginning of the semester I talked about how I typically read texts (especially philosophical ones) with a hermeneutic of suspicion. My secondary goal this semester is to read texts faithfully, or better put, to read them with the intent of holding back judgment and just getting a good understanding of the system without presupposing there's something that I'll disagree with in the text.

    ReplyDelete